“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience — yet all that you know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framework 2. In a manner of speaking your factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, and imagination, from which all of your detailed paraphernalia emerge. What then is myth, and what do I mean by the term?

Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality. That representation is then used as a model upon which your civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens you interpret the private events of your life in their historical context.

(10:06.) When you accept myths you call them facts, of course, for they become so a part of your lives, of societies and your professions, that their basis seems self-apparent. Myths are vast psychic dramas, more truthful than facts. They provide an ever-enduring theater of reality. It must be clearly understood, then, that when I speak of myths I mean to imply the nature of psychic events whose enduring reality exists in Framework 2, and forms the patterns that are then interpreted in your world.

In this part (2) of the book, we are more or less dealing with the events of nature as you understand it. It will seem obvious to some, again, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s own emotional reality. The Christian scientist is caught in between. Because you divorce yourselves from nature, you are not able to understand its manifestations. Often your myths get in the way. When myths become standardized, and too literal, when you begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then you misread them entirely. When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real. Their power becomes constrained.

[...] Myths always weave in and out of historical context, even as dreams are related to daily life. Myths usually include, then, some “provable facts,” either of people historically known to have lived, or in terms of places or physical events of a natural kind. These are often taken then as proof that the myth is fact.

Myths are far more powerful than any facts, and they carry with them the great sway of nature’s own emotional force as it is interpreted through man’s experience. [...] Myths are generally considered to be distorted facts, interpreted by primitive minds, or the result of creative acts of the imagination. [...]

When people say this of course they mean that fact is true and myth is false. [...] Instead, they are considered as myths, pagan stories. [...]

[...] She is dealing instead with an inner world of myths. [...]

[...] It may not have occurred, in one place and in one time, and to one called Christ; but because man has created the myth, he created the Crucifixion out of his own need; and this Crucifixion, which historically did not occur, as the myth says it occurred, nevertheless has as much reality, and more, than it would have had, had it occurred in so-called hard fact.

[...] Myths and symbols are often closer to reality than what are called hard facts, since so-called hard facts are often distortions of the outer senses. [...]

[...] Myths and symbols often are closer to reality, again, than so-called hard facts.

[...] But so-called hard facts, that may seem opposed to symbols and myths, are not necessarily untrue, since they may be necessary distortions without which the inner self could not survive in the material universe.

[...] Then from Seth, mentally, I thought, I got the information that Atlantis, as it’s come down to us in myth and story, was actually a composite of three civilizations. Atlantis is a myth in response to a truth, then, I suppose. [...]

[...] Without giving away any “secrets,” I can write that on both occasions Seth discussed the subject in conjunction with his postulates about ideals, myths, religion, probabilities, and the simultaneous nature of time.)

The consciousness of that myth can indeed have no origin, for the myth precludes anything but a physically-oriented and physically-mechanized consciousness. [...] It is this myth that hampers your understanding most of all, and that closes you off from the greater nature of those events with which you are most intimately concerned. That myth also makes your own involvement with mass events sometimes appear incomprehensible.

[...] (With many pauses:) The main myth through which you interpret your experiences, however, is the one that tells you that all perception and knowledge must come to you through the physical senses.

This is the myth of the exteriorized consciousness — a consciousness that you are told is open-ended only so far as objective reality is concerned. [...]

Such tales are myths. [...] In those terms they represent the darker side of myths, however — yet through their casts you presently view your world. [...]

(10:19.) The myths upon which you base your lives so program your existence that often you verbally deny what you inwardly know. [...] You have made certain divisions because of your myths, of course, that make this kind of explanation extremely important and difficult. [...]

[...] Your myths have given great energy to the outsideness of things.

This myth finds great value in the larger processes of nature in general, and yet sees man alone as the villain of an otherwise edifying tale. [...]

[...] Now when the myths speak, they speak with many voices. You must indeed look beneath them, and you must learn to listen to the inner voice within that is not fooled by any myths. [...] All of the myths should float away, and all the debris. A man’s myths are like his clothing  they are his own affair. [...]

The Christ entity knew the vitality, power, and strength of myths. That vitality allows for different readings, of course, and through man’s changing development he reads his myths differently, yet they serve as containers for intuitional knowledge.

Christ dealt with myths, once again—potent ones that stood for inner realities. [...]

[...] People do not understand that their dreams become reality, and that the greater dramas of history and myth often bear little resemblance to the actual occurrences, but are greater than the physical events.

[...] The myth of the great CHANCE ENCOUNTER, in caps, that is supposed to have brought forth life on your planet then presupposes, of course, an individual consciousness that is, in certain terms, alive by chance alone.

[...] Your myths tell you that nature itself has no intent except survival. [...]

The child accepts the Santa Claus answer for some years, and then becomes disillusioned, realizing that the Santa Claus of Christmas tales is a myth. So in many ways the stories of a God are myths, but you are still left with a bag of toys on one hand, and the luxurious earth on the other, so the question still remains.

My answer is that the myths in their own way try to hint at answers that are basically nonverbal, and at concepts that are themselves the fountainhead from which the earth and all existence springs.

[...] Man’s imagination made him a great maker of myths. Myths as you know them represent bridges of psychological activity, and point quite clearly to patterns of perception and behavior through which, in your terms, the race passed as it traveled to its present state. [...]

If you misinterpret the myths, then you may believe that man has fallen from grace and that his very creaturehood is cursed, in which case you will not trust your body or allow it its “natural” pattern of self-therapy.

[...] (Pause.) Reincarnation, as it is usually explained, in terms of one life before another, is a myth; but a myth enabling many to partially understand facts that they would otherwise dismiss — insisting as they do upon the concept of a continuity of time.

[...] The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future.² The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only r-i-t-e-s (spelled) remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer. [...]

(9:49.) Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one. [...]

2. According to Seth, then, those old religious myths lasted for about 20 centuries, dating from 2000 B.C.

A little investigation gave us glimpses into numerous instances in which blended masculine and feminine qualities are contained in the gods of our very ancient myths. [...] Whether scientific or not, myths may contain the deepest truths of all for our species, at least in conventional terms: Jane and I are intrigued to think that the sources for those verities could spring partly from other realities.

[...] What I hope to say is that your world exists in different terms than those you recognize, and that reincarnation is indeed a myth and a story that stands for something else entirely.

6. Perhaps I should have briefly discussed it in Volume 1, but ever since Seth originally gave his “Joe, Jane, Jim, and Bob” material (as I call it) in the 683rd session, I’ve wondered about possible connections between the probabilities described in that session and our own reality: How much of our species’ distorted, intuitive knowledge of those probable realities may appear as myth and oddity in our camouflage universe? [...]

“Sunday, June 8, 1980: As I went about the day, showering, doing my hair, reading the paper, doing my exercises and so forth, I kept getting stuff from Seth on … the next chapter of his book, I think to be called ‘Master Events and Overlays.’ There can be overlays of one civilization onto another, so that a ‘real’ civilization in one sphere of existence can appear as myth in another…. Our civilization appears as myth in other worlds; that kind of thing represents only one kind of overlay.

[...] Later he used what you think of as myths to explain this abundance. Yet those myths contained a kind of knowledge that escapes your literal, specific interpretations of sexual events. [...]

Dictation: In connection with the creation of the universe, and with the creation of public and private events alike, let us for a moment consider a different kind of myth.

[...] According to the definition I gave earlier, this fairy tale is a myth. [...]

Your stated universe emerged out of that kind of interval, emerging from a master event whose true nature remains uncaptured by your definitions—so there will be places in our book where I may say that an event known to you is true and untrue at the same time, or that it is both myth and fact. [...]

(Pause.) At times your species has traveled those passageways, and many of your myths represent ghost memories of those events. [...]

[...] Many of these will be directly or indirectly connected with old myths and beliefs of your forefathers. [...]

[...] Now in the middle of life, of life conditions, you also appear on occasion as ghosts in other levels of reality, where your “pseudoappearance” causes some comment and is the ground for many myths — and you are not even aware of this.